Regional: Metropolitan Boston Area

By
5 min read

MAPC Convenes Housing Dialogue Among 101 Towns

“Our agency has no power to make people do anything. We can only convince through advocacy and stories,” says Rebecca Davis, deputy director of Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC). What her humility masks is the impact and influence the organization has in fulfilling its mission of promoting smart growth and regional collaboration among the 101 cities and towns that make up the regional Boston area. MAPC works toward sound municipal management, sustainable land use, protection of natural resources, efficient and affordable transportation, a diverse housing stock, public safety, economic development, clean energy, healthy communities, an informed public and equity and opportunity among people of all backgrounds. The agency also promotes local arts and culture, climate projects, natural hazard mitigation and homeland security.

“In today’s housing, real estate and economic environment, planning means communities taking their destiny into their own hands and bringing people together in common effort,” Davis elaborates. “Planning, simply, is setting the stage for community development.” She adds, “We’ve lost a partner at the federal level, so we have to work harder on a local level.”

MAPC collects, interprets and shares housing data, advocating at the state level for legislation to help promote its housing goals, and works with municipalities to create planning documents, local masterplans and model bylaws.

The key to MAPC’s effectiveness, according to Davis, is building support within each community in the regional grid. “We truly have a housing production crisis,” she says. “We have housing authorities and zoning boards with very strong local control. So much of what we do is narrative storytelling to put the important points in context. We are increasingly data-driven, but numbers alone will not move people. So, what we really depend on is the power of convening – of telling the stories with personal examples and of employing good data to build coalitions and bring people together.”

Inclusion
When Davis speaks of bringing people together, she is being all-inclusive. “We have a lot of key players. We have 15 mayors in our region and I really want to give them credit. They have made a regional pledge together regarding housing that they want to build and preserve. We have a great partner in our governor, [Republican Charles Duane] Charlie Baker, who is responsible for a great infusion of dollars and legislative leadership.

Our Massachusetts representatives have been great advocates. We have our nonprofit organizations and affordable housing developers, who realize it is really critical to engage community groups. Our focus is regional and local, so we work with a lot of organizations and national partners.”

Tracking results is becoming increasingly data driven as well, and Davis says it is a community-by-community process. “We look at permits issued, units built, and zoning ordinances passed along the whole pipeline. We’re trying to get the right rules in place on the various legislative levels.”

Being a smart growth advocate, effective density policy is an important issue for MAPC. “We’re always working on zoning ordinances, trying to figure out appropriate levels of density for cities and towns, for infill sites and for retrofits.”

Smart Growth
This smart growth concept was codified in 2008 into a 30-year plan for the Boston region entitled “MetroFuture,” based on input from residents, municipal officials, state agencies, businesses, community-based organizations and institutional partners. It comprises 65 specific goals for the year 2030, as well as objectives and indicators to measure progress toward achieving those goals, and 13 implementation strategies containing hundreds of recommendations for actions to help achieve them.

The next stage of advanced regional planning will be MetroCommon 2050, which will recommend specific strategies for making the region a better place. In the process, it intends to address the question of what does making the region a better place actually mean? Provisional goals include: “Getting Around the Region;” “Homes for All;” “A Climate-Resilient Region;” A “Net Zero Carbon Region;” “Dynamic and Representative Governments;” “A Healthy Environment;” “Economic Security;” “Economic Prosperity;” “Healthy and Safe Neighborhoods;” and “Thriving Arts, Culture and Heritage.” The exciting and comprehensive vision almost sounds like Walt Disney’s original vision for EPCOT, his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. But whereas Disney’s idea merely evolved into a Florida theme park after his death, MetroCommon 2050 is designed for a real world environment and full-time residents.

The terms MAPC uses to describe its aspirational goals show a different perspective than the typical planning or advocacy organization. As an example, one of its validating statements for art and culture is “Urban design, public art and new development contribute to a human-centered, safe and delightful public realm.”

“Delightful” is not a word normally associated with urban or regional planning, yet it certainly gets the point across of what MAPC is trying to achieve. Each of these goals is explained and broken down into components on the mapc.org website.

Achieving “delightful public realms,” however, is not always a delightful exercise. “This is really hard work,” Davis concedes. “I don’t want to underplay that. For every one of our wins, we have two losses. But we meet communities where they are and bring them a little bit further along.”

Story Contact:
Rebecca Davis, [email protected]